


beneath blood ties

by LocketShoru



Category: Saint Seiya
Genre: Angst, Gen, Referenced Past Gaslighting, Referenced past abuse, Unhappy Ending, Unspecified Verse, Whump
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-31
Updated: 2020-05-31
Packaged: 2021-03-03 01:15:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,073
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24476344
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LocketShoru/pseuds/LocketShoru
Summary: He tried. He tried so hard, and he failed, and he only gets one more shot to try to set his heart right.
Relationships: Griffon Minos & Aries Kirien, Griffon Minos & Original Female Character
Comments: 2
Kudos: 6





	beneath blood ties

**Author's Note:**

> Popped into my head today and couldn’t argue with Minos on this one. Probably around ~1500 years ago?? 400-500AD Holy War, about a war after the Virgo Lakshmi incident. Tl;dr Sanctuary grabbed all the reincarnating Spectres, made them Saints, and fucked up literally everyone involved, as they do.  
> Inspired by one line in Once Broken Faith by Seanan McGuire. I read a lot of Toby Daye, it’s my comfort series. Leave me alone about it.  
> Posting at work because I wrote it at work. That’s how it be some days.

He heard the shuffling against the silence like high tide against the cliffs, and he looked up with desperation in his eyes and straining against bonds that he could’ve dispelled with a flick of his wrist. His hair was a cloud around his face, snarled and tangled and covered in mud, his face scratched and bleeding. It stung, and he bit his lip to keep from smiling as the faint glow of golden armour reflected off the cavern’s walls.

“Hello?” he called, his voice weak, his voice that of a teenage boy brutally beat. “Is anyone there?”

“Sima?” The shuffling twisted into a run, immediate and trumpeting in its noise. His stomach gave a lurch. The very person he didn’t want to be seeing, not here, not now. And yet there she was, appearing around the turn, her armour a little scuffed from the effort of getting this far and her cape a little torn, but still the one person he had once trusted with his life.

The only problem was that he’d never be able to trust her with his unlife, too. Aries Kirien came around the corner and bolted for him, sliding easily onto her knees, scraping against the rock, her fingers already at the strings of Cosmos that held him in his keeling position. 

“Sima, I’m here, I’m here,” she murmured. He leaned forward, if a bit involuntarily, and pressed his forehead to her throat, openly exposed by the Aries Cloth’s gorget. He could feel her fingers barely trace his wrists as she worked, trying to undo the Cosmic Marionation that held him tight. If she hadn’t refused to see the stage they were set upon, had been focused enough to think, she’d know where those bindings were coming from. But she wouldn’t see him that way. She refused to start, and that was when he’d lost his hold on her hand.

And they said his Lord Hades was the cruel one. He leaned a little closer, breathed against her racing heartbeat. He wouldn’t be able to save her, and he knew that. Not after her descent this far into the Meikai in her quest to bring him - bring them all - home. He could feel the rumbling of anger before she could - if she ever could - that implied exactly what he thought. 

“Kiriel-” he began, but she shook her head, eyes still focused on threads she could barely see, trying to untangle them, trying to free him.

“I’ve almost got it, Sima,” she murmured, and he knew she was lying, still lying to him after all the time, and for once he actually understood why. Because he’d lied to her, too, was still lying to her, and unlike him, she’d believed him. “I’ve almost got it, and then we can get you home. I don’t care about anyone else, if I can get you out of here alive.”

He felt one thread snap, cut loose by the precision only she had managed to narrow her cosmos to achieve in a _Stardust Revolution_ that didn’t destroy the world around her. And not a moment sooner, another thread replaced it, and she swore under her breath, Estonian curses he’d heard and politely pretended not to before. “It’s okay, Sima,” she murmured. “I’ve got this. A little bit more power and you’re free.”

He opened his mouth to speak, but she cut him off, still in that soft voice that had meant ‘home’ for years, even though they were presently in the only location he could truly consider home. Something had always been missing. “I’ll make you some hot chocolate, okay? With the good cream and the fudge we get shipped all the way from England. I’ll make you some hot chocolate and just this once, I’ll let you use whatever you want from my bath soaps.”

It wasn’t a tempting offer, it wasn’t anything he couldn’t get now, with all the privileges of a Judge of Hell sorely missed by the Meikai. But he’d still delay it all if it meant he could have one more moment in her arms, where things didn’t have to be so _complicated_. The rumbling in the ground told him he might never get it, and she looked up, throwing herself forward to pull him into her, press his face into her chest as the trembling shook the cavern. He head something crack. The mouth of the cavern gave a groan before the shaking shifted to a wail, and he started to cough, the dust and dirt seeping through them both.

Kirien held him tight, protective, guarding him as surely as she guarded the gates of the Twelve Temples until the earthquake subsided. She wouldn’t have heard the emotion in the rumbling, not like he did. There was a meaning there, if one asked the rocks that fell to block the entrance of the cave, to shut them in. The Meikai usually had opinions on most matters, and this one was a firm ‘Leave.’ Not that Kirien would have understood it if she’d asked.

The moment the shaking stopped, she pulled back just enough to keep working at the threads. It was an impossible quest, meant to draw out the Gold Saints and distract them as surely as trapping Daedalus at Sicily, bring them into the Meikai by their own sentimentality and bring them down with the taste of betrayal on their lips. A fair price to pay, for Sanctuary seeking out reincarnated Spectres and making them into Saints, before any of them had realized they were the true enemy. 

He didn’t know what he hated them for more. The fact that even now he couldn’t fully trust his Lord - and wouldn’t _that_ be a problem, as long as he chanced to live - or the fact that Kirien would not, did not, could not understand that he still loved her, that he was home, that she needed to give up on the Lady that twisted the blade of loyalty a little further into them both with every command that fell from her lips. No matter what side he stood on, he was losing. And there was no way to win.

A flicker of cosmos sharpened behind him, before vanishing again. He twisted around to try and see it without losing his grip on the threads that Kirien was still trying to untie. 

“Stop squirming, Sima,” she murmured, but she sounded less angry and more desperate. 

“Something’s coming,” he answered, craning his head until he could see past the mess of his silver, muddy hair deeper into the cave. He caught a musty cinnamon scent on the faint breeze, a warning of the Meikai of what generally lived in this cave.

He did _so_ enjoy dragons, and if he listened, he could almost hear it slither towards them. He counted his breaths, one two three four and five, letting the slithering inch towards them as Kirien worked, futile and tireless. Beside them, set aside specifically if he needed it, was an unlit torch. The dragon was almost upon them, almost close enough that Kirien would see, and he stood up.

His hand darted out. Grabbed the torch and swung around until Kirien was standing too, tight in his arm as he spun on his heel. _Come to me_ , he commanded, silent with a flare of cosmos, and he was gowned in a Surplice, brutal and blue-gray and winged. Another flare of cosmos, and the torch was alight blue-green with witchlight. He held it out left handed, flame towards the dragon, Kirien under one arm with a wing draped gently over her shoulders. She stared up at him, and not the illuminated dragon, and he knew he’d never be forgiven.

He didn’t care what Lady Athena - and damned that he still felt bad for her! - might think of him. But Kirien was different.

The dragon eyed him, the flickering of the witchlight torch flaring towards it and shattering across the room with light. He knew this dragon, who had made it, who had sired it, what its name was. He’d never met him before, not in this life, but below conscious thought, below the memories he’d repressed trying to appease a goddess that had taken him from his home and had commanded him to be what she wanted him to be, regardless of the cost, he remembered.

The dragon had scales of a deep magenta that chimed like glass shards every time he moved and horns like soft amethysts, eyes of a ruby-red and claws of carefully-carved rose quartz. They called them the Roseglass dragons, made from the flesh of two Spectres who still, even after so many weeks back in the Meikai, hadn’t quite found their way home. And this was the oldest of them all, two thousand years and still alive and powerful. An image flashed across his thoughts, an exhausted Rienna - Rhadamanthys, he was sure, past all the smoke - carrying a hatchling across a lush meadow that he was certain only existed in his mind. Nothing else smelled so sweet.

“Beiothyne, it’s me,” he said, quietly, all too aware of Kirien’s mounting horror. “You remember me, even when I don’t remember me. It’s okay.” 

Beiothyne, eldest of the Roseglass dragons, eldest of Rhadamanthys’ and Harpy Valentra’s children, huffed at him, and turned his muzzle pointedly towards Kirien. She took a step back, or rather, she tried to - his wing and his arm around her kept her from backing up. His question was obvious, and understandable.

“She’s with me,” he answered, and looked one of his eldest nephews in the eye, hoping to whichever god was listening, really, that Beiothyne wouldn’t fight him on this. That he wouldn’t have to break another heart, wouldn’t have to kill someone he cared about. Somewhere below those buried memories, his blood remembered. His blood remembered what it was like to care.

Beiothyne huffed again, and turned tail, and walked back deeper into the cave. The moment the light of his scales faded on the walls, Kirien shook free of his grasp and stepped away, staring at him, her cosmos flared with anger and anticipation for a fight. “Were you even ensnared?” she demanded, and he flinched from the betrayal in her voice. How he’d hoped she could have been anyone else.

“No,” he admitted. “This was a trap. I never - believe me, I _never_ wanted you to be the one caught in it.” It didn’t matter if he apologized, it didn’t matter if he said he cared. She would believe his lies right up until she couldn’t, and then she wouldn’t trust his truths, either. Her face turned into a scowl, the betrayal written clearly in her face. “Please, Kirien… I didn’t want it to come to this.”

“Do you even know where we _are_?” she asked, and her voice was low, almost a whisper, full of anger. “This is the Underworld, Sima. This is the place where innocence and justice go to die. This is where the Spectres play, and they’re so much crueler than you think they are. I tried to shield you from their cruelties. I _tried_ , Sima.”

It didn’t help that her every word was a prayer to a goddess that hadn’t cared for him except to use him, to keep him from being used, in hopes she might still save him. She had forsaken him, pretending that she still loved him. It helped even less that Kirien’s words proved she still loved him. And worst of all, that her every word was completely false, and she wasn’t lying. 

“This is the Kingdom of the Meikai,” he answered, finding his voice firm but raw, agony creeping into his every syllable. “This is where justice has been chained up and told to die in the corner under the weight of laws it didn’t make and never asked for. This is where the world is turned on its head, and the injustice of the Meikai isn’t its own creation. I know how cruel Spectres are.” He let out a soft, jarring laugh, and maybe it sounded unhinged, like a man losing control, but he knew it for what it was: the laugh of a broken teenager who just wanted to go home. He held his hand out to one side, shifting his gauntlet to expose his forearm, and drew a dagger from the pocket of his tassets, and sliced his skin open.

The blood was a rich, rich red, and he allowed seven drops to fall before he pushed his gauntlet back up. He wouldn’t bleed for long, Griffon wouldn’t allow it. But the drops of blood splashed against the rock, and where every one landed, a rose of perilous, dangerous red rose and bloomed.

Perks of having been both the Aries and Pisces apprentices, tilted so far towards one but placed in the middle to break him quicker: he knew what his blood could do, and if all the rules were different here, well. Blood had so many more uses, in the land of death. Kirien stared at the roses. Slowly, she tore her eyes away from them, and looked at him.

“Because deep down, below what Lady Athena did to me, my blood remembers,” he answered in lieu of her unspoken question. “Below conscious thought, below even my own memories… my blood remembers who I am, _what_ I am, and what I’m supposed to do. I would have ripped myself into pieces trying to be what she wanted me to be.”

Kirien stopped, and let out a disbelieving laugh. She knew him well, so damn well. She’d seen him on the floor, curled up listlessly in a corner, unable to work up the motivation to practice or train. She’d seen him haunt the Aries Temple at midnight on a new moon’s night, sure that it meant something important and that he should be taking advantage of it, but not knowing what to do. Humming songs he never understood while washing dishes together. She’d watched him fight with his own cosmos, his own telekinesis, always trying to control things like they were simple marionnettes over using his mind like a proper Lemurian. He’d always been different, and strange, and wrong.

He raised a hand, flicking his cosmos, and the threads reappeared, reaching for a lock of her hair, spinning it into a quick braid, aided by his natural telekinesis. Now that he’d stopped confusing the two, they both had come so much easier to him. “Please, Kirien. There was no other way for this to end.”

“I think you should stop trying to reason with her, and get on with your objectives. But if you won’t, I’ll finish her off for you,” growled a voice behind her, and he hadn’t even noticed the cosmos entering the cave, though they both knew that voice so well. “ _Galactica’s Harbinger of Death_.” 

Kirien’s scream was cut short. He lunged forward, catching her in one arm and swinging the other over her shoulder, ignoring how her cloth’s horns jammed into his armpit. “ _Eclipse Domination!_ ” he screeched, and he ignored the sickening crunch of bones as the guillotine of his cosmos fell. Lenaco - Aiacos - would be fine. He’d have to put himself back together, but he’d be fine. Kirien, on the other wing…

He dropped to his knees, cradling her, sweepin his wings around her in a protective bubble as he set her down against him. She was bleeding from the half-a-foot-wide hole in her stomach, most of her nervous system gone from the attack. Even if she lived, she’d never walk again. He reached forward with his cosmos, his blood poisonous but knowing how to knit flesh back together, sutures upon sutures and threads until she’d stop bleeding, until she was stable enough that he could fly her to a healer. Their Dryad might listen. He might not, but he might.

She was trying to breathe, trying not to cough up blood. “ _Cosmic Marionation,_ ” he murmured, reaching out with a bit more power. It wasn’t enough. The threads stopped an inch away from her body, refusing to move closer, refusing to do what he needed them to do. His voice rose in almost a shriek. “Work, damn it! I’m not-”

Kirien gave a lurching gasp, her voice a soft, brutal laugh. “Ahh… Athena’s blessing, won’t let a Spectre gut me properly. How nice of her.” 

He looked up, staring, horrified. “You need to let her go,” he pleaded, trying to focus, trying not to panic. “You need to forsake her. Let go of her, Kirien. I can save you if you give up on her.”

She blinked, and smiled, even as he reached up to wipe a thin trail of blood away from her mouth. “You can’t save me from a wound this bad, Sima,” she murmured. “He didn’t play by the rules, and neither did you. That means it can’t be argued with.”

“I could argue the remaking of the world, if I wanted to,” he spat in return. “Len- Aiacos did it because he’s angry. I’m allowed to kill another Spectre, and he’s not Cancer Daryus’ apprentice anymore. That’s in the rules. Even if it wasn’t, I’d do it. For you, I’d do it.”

His words were a prayer, and he forced his hand down again, focusing as much cosmos as he could toward the wound, hoping to patch it, just long enough to be able to move her. Beiothyne wasn’t a healer, wasn’t around to help. Aiacos’ corpse wouldn’t have anything in its pockets to help.

“Oh, Sima… You would’ve made a wonderful Aries Saint,” she murmured, and reached up to stroke a stray tear away from his cheek with her thumb. He didn’t even notice that he’d started to cry. “You’d refuse the remaking of the world, even when you can’t, and that’s why you’d survive to carry Athena’s love back into the ruined world.”

His fingers wouldn’t touch the wound. He couldn’t reach to save her, and Griffon murmured into his ear, the last thing he wanted to hear, indescribable and only an indication. The cogs of the beautiful, broken machine had begun to turn. Maybe he could have argued her death. But all her blood would taste of was death at this point - there was no arguing with a finality, once it had gone too far. And Kirien, his Kirien, the woman who’d raised him and tried to help his wayward soul find its way even when it sailed on an unfamiliar sea, was too far gone.

“My name is Minos,” he said, quietly, and the agony climbed up his throat, and there was nothing he could do. Even in all his teenage rage, and all that he tried to do to be the Saint they wanted him to become, even on home ground in a field he was a natural expert in, he’d never felt so useless. “Celestial Noble Star Griffon Minos. I don’t know what my surname would be, Lady Athena saw fit to take it from me. But I’d be Minos Kiriensen if I got to choose.”

She laughed, a small, choked sound. “Maybe you are,” she agreed. “I’d let you be Minos Kiriensen, everywhere but here. You’ll always be my little Sima to me.”

“This is the only place I ever want to hear that name again,” he answered, and he pressed his forehead to hers. Time was running out - had already run out. There was no saving the only blessing Lady Athena had given him. All that he could be now was the archivist to her memory. He could almost feel his blood shifting, murmuring, reminiscing, remembering.

Somewhere deep below conscious thought, below his training and the life and this Lemurian body, buried under lifetimes of war, buried under the idea that a Spectre was a fighter, his blood remembered how to love the memory of the fallen.

The winds swept across the sea of Mag Mell as easy as a summer breeze. Maybe they were salted across the air, or maybe he was just not doing a good enough job of stifling his tears. He walked across the bone-white beach without even bothering to muffle his footsteps - maybe Cetus Karina would be here, maybe not. She’d feel his cosmos on the winds sparkling with his agony and she’d vanish into the sea. He wasn’t here to talk to her, and that meant she would be smart to stay out of his way.

Kirien’s body lay in his arms as he carried her over to the rip in the tide. This wasn’t a moonlit stroll for an apprentice and the Saint who guarded and trained him, no, this was a funeral’s wake, and he wasn’t going to let it be anything else. Kirien deserved that respect, and below the war that had raged across so many of his lifetimes, he remembered the proper death rites.

His lips parted in a careful ‘o’ shape as he took a breath and began to whistle. The Meikai woke before him, paying attention to him now as his cosmos flared like the lighthouse he was giving up for his loyalty to his Lord. There was nothing else to be done, and the Meikai answered his requiem, answering with roots of driftwood rising from the waves, weaving themselves into the proper form, until a small canoe-like pyre of driftwood held steady in the gentle waves. It glimmered for a moment, and the flowers upon it rose and bloomed: love-lies-bleeding and albafica and forget-me-not, and yes, it was - his blood roses, born of sorrow and of home and of betrayal. He would love her a thousand years from now, when she was nothing but a name and a memory in his blood.

He set her upon the pyre, wrapped her cloak around her still form like a shroud, whistled until the flowers bloomed around it, holding the shroud in place, keeping her tucked into her last bed. He whistled her requiem and the Meikai echoed in back to him, forming a canon, a harmony that he knew in his gut was older than the Holy Wars. And if it was older than war, then it was old enough to remember, and promise, peace.

He heard the shuffling behind him, felt the cosmos, distinctly both expected and surprised by the hand placed gently on his shoulder, a second whistle joining his melody. He expected someone to join him - it was rare, he felt, for a funeral wake like this to be held alone - but he hadn’t expected it to be Aiacos. Once Lenaco, the apprentice of Cancer Daryus, still wild, though his laughter cut into pieces and held apart from him more with each passing day. He’d been the one to rescue him, the one to wake up from Lady Athena’s illusion.

He wondered if he ever really would, without Kirien to light his way. Aiacos had been able to shrug off the illusion like a shroud. He wasn’t sure if he could have that, though he had always been more reserved where Aiacos had craved his freedom. A cage was all in how you looked at it.

He lifted his index and middle fingers to his lips, still whistling, and let his breath blow witchlight onto them, a candle’s flame of a thing, kissing them gently before pressing his fingers and the witchlight to the stern of the pyre. The flame spread faster than he expected, and that was exactly right, enveloping her shroud and her pyre, releasing the scent of burning flowers like tears into the salted winds.

He gave the boat a gentle push, and allowed the rip to carry it into Mag Mell, another Kingdom, where the souls of Saints rightly shouldn’t go, but where he was sure they sent the righteous they couldn’t reward onward. Her afterlife would be peaceful, when the psychopomps of another Kingdom caught her.

“Set sail upon the winds of sorrow, Aries Kirien,” he murmured. “And wherever from here you roam, may you be always known, for here we leave you, for ballad and for bone.”

He let the whistled requiem fall from his lips, with the proper words to accompany it, and watched as the blue-green funeral pyre floated off across the tides, into the starry seas of Mag Mell, taking the soul of the only Saint he’d ever loved out into the greater world, where she too, might yet find a lighthouse burning, welcoming her home.


End file.
